Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion
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Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. As such, our focus starts there and spreads to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. Since successful blogs create communities of readers and writers, we hope the \x34& Co.\x34 will also come to include you.

Knowing our fearless leader, Obama will view the chance for the photo op of wallowing through the blood of more children in a public elementary school to be a great way to distract people from the corruption oozing out of his regime. Our thoughts and prayers are with you, he’ll thunder in Oklahoma, as he proceeds to blame Republicans for opposing tornado control.
Of course, the tragedy in Oklahoma has been both foreseeable and expected for nearly twenty years, ever since the federal No Child Left Behind law required diverting all school money into achieving pointless test scores as opposed to providing for the regional facilities-needs that used to include storm shelters. I got an earful of this when I was down in Texas last March, in which it was pointed out that schools and housing in the Plains states now lack adequate storm shelters due to the way that federal funding affects both school and housing construction. As I was also told last March, in the old days, school districts used to send kids home during tornado watches when shelters were lacking–but now know. If you send kids home from school, you still need to meet your federal attendance requirements, meaning that you have to push school into the summer months, when the thermometer soars to 110, and air conditioning becomes too expensive. Better to leave your kids as sitting ducks in poorly built schools, cause the odds of a direct hit are pretty low, so you have to break some eggs to make the MCAS omelet. In the old days, the schools would get around this by building “bomb shelters,” but the fed put an end to that practice too.
Guns don’t kill kids. People kill kids. Obama kills kids. Drones kill kids. Bad federal policies kill kids. But that won’t be his message when Obama fires up Air Force One for yet another wasted junket to be our comforter in chief.